Family Storytime: Picnic

Everyone who came were familiar faces and we had a fun time with our picnic/food theme. 

We followed along to the bean bag song and then I read It's the Bear by Jez Alborough. The group really enjoyed this story about a boy afraid of a bear while he's on a picnic and of the bear being afraid of him. 

Next, we added fruits and veggies to our "picnic blanket" and we went through the names of the fruits and veggies and their colors. Everyone got a turn to put their food on the magnetic sheet pan.

Next, I read The Watermelon Seed by Greg Pizzoli. The kids really do love this book! Everytime I read it, it's a hit and the kids love to laugh about the seed growing in crocodile's belly.  

After this book, we guessed which colored picnic basket had the apple underneath it using the flannel board.

Then we read our third book, Picnic by John Burningham. This book kept the kids attention because it asked to find certain things in the pictures, but I would say this was their least favorite out of the four books.

We made the tallest ice cream cone with our different colored scoops and each had a turn and then we read Muddle & Mo's Worm Surprise. It was fun to see the kids faces when the picnic food would be worms.

We made a watermelon craft using paint. The kids got done with this craft fast, but they enjoyed using paint for a bit.

This was a good theme that had enough to use for just a picnic theme.

Other Books:

We're Going on a Picnic Pat Huchins

Ready for Anything! Keiko Kasza

Freda Plans a Picnic Stuart J. Murphy

Summer Supper Rubin Pfeffer

The Teddy Bears' Picnic Jimmy Kennedy

Other Activities:

-Plastic Food Activity

-Five Hungry Ants Fingerplay

-Stone Soup Story Flannel

-Hungry Caterpillar Flannel

-5 cookies Flannel

-ice cream cone Flannel

-Vegetable Game

-pizzas fingerplay

-Popsicle Flannel

Family Storytime: Food

For our short storytime week due to the Thanksgiving holiday, we decided to do a food/sharing/Thanksgiving theme and it worked out great. For my storytime, I focused more on food books and sharing and this turned out to be one of my favorite storytimes of the fall sessions. 

We read a total of three books together, used the flannel board two times, sang a song together, and made our craft.

I ended up reading How Do Dinosaurs Eat Their Food? by Jane Yolen for my first book. The group loved this book and weren't distracted the whole time. 

Our first activity was counting shape cookies on the flannel board. I handed out different cookies and they each had a chance to put theirs on the board. Then we went over each cookie's shape and color and counted each one. 

The next book I read was Who Put the Cookies in the Cookie Jar? by George Shannon. This is different from the classic everyone knows, but shows all what it takes and who it takes to make one cookie and went perfectly well with the sharing and community table theme.  

For our next activity, I thought we could add turkey feathers to our flannel turkey. It was another opportunity for them to interact with the flannel board while we counted and went over our colors. 

The final book of the night was Dim Sum for Everyone! by Grace Lin. A great, short book to incorporate a different culture into the mix. 

After we had our book fix, and boy did they do wonderful with their attention spans, we sang "If You're Happy and You Know It" and then I explained our craft.

We decorated construction paper cookies using cut out circles and black paint for chocolate chips. We also wrote what we were thankful for on the back and turned a few of our cookies into the cookie jar and kept the rest to take home.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Toddler Art: Food

I based my whole Toddler Art: Food program around the classic book If You Give a Moose a Muffin by Laura Joffe Numeroff. This was a simple enough book for the toddlers to listen to and the crafts were rather easy enough for them too. 

This group listened very well and had a better listening day than my older kids. 

For our first craft, we made Moose's muffin using a half of a paper plate and sponges dipped in brown paint. This was a good opportunity for them to use their fine motor skills and use paint. 

The moose craft was a little bit more complicated for them, but the parents easily helped their little ones along with using the glue sticks to make Moose.

Our next theme will be story characters. I'm thinking a cute Cookie Monster craft, but we'll see where Pinterest takes me. 
 

Preschool Picasso: Food

For this month's theme for Preschool Picasso, we read a story and completed two crafts around food. This theme could have been using food as craft tools or based around a book about food. I decided to go with the latter. 

We read Dragons Love Tacos by Adam Rubin and made a dragon and a taco craft. 

The group was so enthralled into the book that I knew this was a good pick! How can you go wrong with this silly book? 

After reading the story, we made our dragon craft and then our taco craft. For our dragon craft, we used bubble wrap and red paint to make scales on each of our dragons and for our taco craft, we had different textures of paper to make our delicious taco, along with some yellow paint using sponges to make our taco shell. 

The group really enjoyed this theme, but I think my next goal will be to try to incorporate the food theme even more by somehow using actual food as crafting tools.  

 

Family Storytime: Soup!

Despite the weather being unusually warm for February, we had a fun storytime all about soup! I really liked this theme because as unique as it is, it has some great books to pair with it. I was thinking I could do winter foods (hot chocolate, stew, chili, etc.) if I couldn't find enough soup books, but using inter-library loan, everything came together perfectly and I had a variety of books to sample.

Surprisingly, the kids weren't so enthusiastic this time around to do the bean bag song. My guess is it had to do with them taking advantage of the nice weather earlier by playing outside and they became exhausted. 

Our first soup story was Duck Soup by Jackie Urbanovic. This is a hilarious picture book about Max the Duck cooking his first pot of soup but is believed to be missing by his friends. Brody, Dakota, and Bebe can't find their quackie friend and their imaginations quickly spin out of control. 

After hearing how Max prepared his soup, we had to make our own pot of imaginary soup. I brought a cooking pot in and after disappointingly finding out that my local dollar store ran out of plastic toy vegetables, we used laminated vegetable clip art to make our soup. I handed out a few veggies to each in the group and called out vegetables. We went over the colors and tossed them into our pot. I stirred the pot and we all pretended to slurp our delicious vegetable soup. The kids loved this and I was impressed with how much fun they had with their imaginations. 

Our second story, Making Minestrone by Stella Blackstone and Nan Brooks, took care of our (ahem, or maybe my) rhyming fix. This is a story that step-by-step shows how a group of friends prepare minestrone together, complete with a grocery list and recipe. 

Before we got to our third book, we went over some of the types of vegetables and their colors of those that I had laminated. It was supposed to be a guessing game where I take one veggie away and the kids have to guess which one, but the laminated pieces with felt on the back were not sticking to the flannel board for anything. An easy improvise and the kids still had fun. I ended this a little early so we could do some more reading together. 

Slop Goes the Soup by Pamela D. Edwards and Henry Cole is a fun book about all the noises that we hear when we make, and sometimes get messy, with soup. The group liked making the noises along with me and found the book quite comical.

I happened to have two families show up after our third book, so I asked the group if they wanted to hear one more story. I got a resounding yes, so we read on and those who just walked in were able to get a story...or two in!

Soup for One by Ethan Long makes the idea of flies invading a bowl of soup entertaining as we count the flies as we go, noticing the curious spider who always seems to be watching. I liked the art in this one.

Our final story was Is that Wise, Pig? by Jan Thomas. Cow and Pig are making Mouse some soup, but Pig wants to add umbrellas and galoshes into the mix. "Is that wise, Pig?" You'll find out in the end of this silly story. 

 It was great to be able to read five stories without losing the kids' attention spans!

For our craft, we made alphabet soup. We had a bunch of leftover letter stickers so this worked out nicely and the craft turned out so cute. The younger kids tried spelling out their names and the other kids had fun coming up with words we could make from their alphabet soup. 

This storytime was mmm, mmm, good!